Saturday, September 20, 2008

Triangles on Twitter

Here is an example of closing triangles via Twitter. Track the triangle closing process from my Twitter log above -- oldest tweet on bottom. The blank space in the tweet log was from another person I am following that had nothing to do with the closing of the triangle. Starting at the bottom of the above pic...

1) I follow John Robb on Twitter and he tweets about a book he is reading2) I re-tweet his post so that those who follow me on Twitter can learn about the book.3) June, who is following me, sees the re-tweet and aims her tweet at John [using @johnrobb] stating she has read the book and found it useful.

Two people that I have known, but did not know each other, can now be connected. They connect by seeing [via Twitter] their mutual interest in a book and in an idea. Maybe June and John can now talk about "resilient communities" and their experiences with them?

Since June and John have some similar interests, yet come from diffeent communities and contexts, we have another example of...

7 comments:

Would it not be impossible for June to send a tweet to @johnrobb unless he is following her? This inability to close the triangle is what has been frustrating me about Twitter. Am I just mistaken about how it works?

One problem with the current 'replies' tab is that it only shows tweets STARTING with @yourname. If a tweet has @yourname anywhere else in it, it gets lost in the noise (or search.twitter.com) finds it.